Finding and Working with Data Sets

Throughout the three panels and the keynote, a key challenge that came up time and again was data sets. Where do you find data sets likely to be of interest to students? What kinds work best? What do you need to do to them to get them in a form with which students can productively work? How much choice should students have about which data sets with which they will work? 

Related Content: 
Big Data: What's In It For High School Students? (Event Archive)
Teaching Teachers to Teach Data (Event Archive)
How I'm Teaching and Assessing Data in My Classroom (Event Archive)
Keynote on Teaching Data (Event Archive)
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Comments

sean.smorris
sean.smorris29 weeks 1 day ago

Vet the sites!

I am with you both but I would suggest we make an effort as a community to find a variety of potential data sets from a wide array of domains(20?) and set up lessons that help students explore the particular domain the data set represents.  This would allow choice but also not leave students swimming upstream. This kind of formative approach could then be followed up with an open-ended project(The Data Task) in which they explore whatever data set they choose.

Deepa K Muralidhar
Deepa K Muralidhar29 weeks 3 days ago

Letting students choose their own data sets...

I agree... finding data sets that students can clean, manipulate and find patterns is  a challenge. However, I still encourage the idea that students should be able to search for data sets that they are interested in. 
One key reason is that patterns emerge only if the questions applied on the data sets are appropriate. If a student is not interested in the data, or not very knowledgeable they are possibly not going to apply the right questions on it.

Maureen.P-D
Maureen.P-D29 weeks 2 days ago

Yes!  We could direct the

Yes!  We could direct the students to data rich sites (US Census, CIA World Fact Book, National Climate Data Center, International Monetary Fund, Data.gov, Eurostat, Global Health Observatory, HUD, UN, Bureau of Labor and Statistics, Natureserve) and let them choose.  We might have to vet the sites first.  I think it would be a blast!  Now I want to do it!

Also, if we are interested in limiting the discussion to trend identification, identification of key variable, etc., then we could let them generate data using models, and let them evaluate that.